Yes, baseball fans, that is plural this month. Morons. An honor that looks to encompass all those who endeavor to report the sport to us. Not as play-by-play or color announcers. Not as team beat writers for the local newspaper. Nope, these are parasites. Cockroaches. Cancerous and inoperable tumors.
They are the so-called "Baseball Insiders."
There are many out among us. But, the three biggest offenders are...
Fox Sports' dumb-as-dirt Ken Rosenthal.
Sports Illustrated's "most likely to use this photo on a taxi cab license" Jon Heyman. Talent as small as the only snapshot I could find.
And MLB Analyst/lifelong Boston Red Sox fan Peter Gammons, who, to this day, reminds me of one of the elder chimps in "Planet of the Apes."
Okay, you see their pictures. Be aware that they walk among you. Len Speaks is granting you each permission. If anybody out there sees these three schmucks on the street, you are hereby allowed to bash in their skulls with the bluntest object you can find.
We find ourselves smack dab in the middle of July and the annual All-Star break. Teams are assessing where they are in the standings. Taking a breath and getting ready for the second half. Back in the old days, if you were already out of it for the season, you pressed on content to be spoilers and sold off hot dogs for half-price. Those teams still in the hunt look for extra production from their stars, hoping it will be enough to get them over the top. They start to charge twenty-five cents more per frankfurter.
Except now we have the July 31st trading deadline.
All of a sudden, it is frenzy. Chaos. Mania. Which team is a buyer, trying to get new players? Which team is a seller, looking to unload high-priced garbage in a cost-saving move? It all prompts a flurry of media histrionics.
And most of it is fueled by these three fecalheads. Reporting all the news? Hardly. Forget journalism. For them, it was probably nothing more than a class they slept through. Nope, these jerks take something they hear in a hotel elevator and turn it into a rumor that sounds like it could be right. To them. Forget logic. Forget facts. Damn it all to Hell. These are the guys who have their fingers on the pulse of America's pastime.
Gammons is a complete joke. He knows little about baseball except for whoever is on his beloved Boston Red Sox at the present time. Yet, he somehow parlays this into a Yoda-like existence that baffles any baseball fan. He likes to announce a pending trade that he has gotten from a reliable source, who might be simply the peanut vendor in the mezzanine. The standard joke is that, if Peter Gammons talks of a transaction, the opposite will actually happen. He can't discern fact from fiction. It's simply a matter of time before Gammons announces that Babe Ruth has been placed on waivers by the New York Yankees.
Jon Heyman, who has actually worked for news organizations that, from time to time, do hire professionals, is inherently dangerous. Because most of his "inside" dope is fed to him by agents who are using him to create a false marketplace for their ballplaying clients. Rumor has it that Heyman lives for part of each year in the breast pocket of super agent Scott Boras' sport jacket. When a sports reporter scores the unethical line as much as Heyman does, there is a major problem with the media allegedly covering the sport.
Ken Rosenthal is just a plain jackass. He pops up on Fox' national broadcasts, spewing gossip that he might have dreamed up on a breakfast napkin at Denny's. Several months ago, he "announced" that friends of Joe Torre have told him that he no longer wants to manage the Dodgers when his contract is up. What friends? Even Joe Torre didn't know when questioned about it. Yet, after several public and vehement denials, Rosenthal, who was probably beaten up regularly in high school, came back at it again. This time, it wasn't positioned as "friends of Joe Torre." Now, it's "Joe Torre's close confidentes." Oh, that makes a big difference. Does Rosenthal know anything really about the subject? Absolutely not. But, that doesn't stop him. After all, he is a "baseball insider."
As a baseball fan, I truly despise this month. As much as I'd like to hear that the Dodgers have resurrected Don Drysdale, the process of sifting through the nonsense around that news creates an ugly cloud that darkens my love of the game. Because, in my mind, it's not about single players, but the whole team.
Geeks like these three asswipes, however, feed on it all and make the days prior to the July inter-league trading deadline a mind-altering and headache-inducing event.
Let me know when it's August 1. I'll avoid these morons until then.
And, frankly, I'll probably ignore them after August 1 as well.
Dinner last night: Lasagna.
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